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25040Venturebeat.comThis marketing tool can auto-generate 600+ customized landing pages for your brandhttp://venturebeat.com/2014/05/20/this-marketing-tool-can-auto-generate-600-customized-landing-pages-for-your-brand/
http://venturebeat.com/2014/05/20/this-marketing-tool-can-auto-generate-600-customized-landing-pages-for-your-brand/#respondTue, 20 May 2014 23:22:52 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1476841Marketing software company Captora is announcing its second round of funding today — a new $22 million. The main goal of Captora’s software is to bring in tons of leads, and to do that, it helps marketers optimize their company’s online content in various ways, though this is nothing new and companies including HubSpot, Moz, and Marketo […]
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Marketing software company Captora is announcing its second round of funding today — a new $22 million.

The main goal of Captora’s software is to bring in tons of leads, and to do that, it helps marketers optimize their company’s online content in various ways, though this is nothing new and companies including HubSpot, Moz, and Marketo have been offering various kinds marketing software.

“Marketing’s job is to engage new customers before they even know about your company. Most leads come to a company’s website because they have heard about your company,” Captora chief executive Paul Albright told VentureBeat.

His example: Imagine you own a plumbing company and you want software to help you improve and scale your business. If you search for “plumbing service software” on Google, fairly close to the top, you’ll see ServiceMax as a result with the keyword in the title — pretty good already.

Now, if you search for “boiler service software,” ServiceMax is again at the top, but the item’s title matches the new search keyword. And of course, if you click on this link, it will take you to a landing page branded with the keywords “boiler service software,” while clicking on the link in the first search takes you to a “plumbing service software” landing page. In fact, Captora customer ServiceMax has over 600 pages, generated automatically, that match such keywords.

“Captora identifies where there are marketing gaps in social, advertising, and search channels. We do 95 percent of the work through automation and technology that traditionally marketers have done by hand,” said Albright, himself a former marketing executive.

With it’s new funding in tow, the company says it will continue to add more applications to help fill this gap. It also plans to expand across the U.S and internationally in the next six to 12 months as well as continue to grow its teams, in particular on the engineering side.

New Enterprise Associates (NEA) led this funding round, with additional participation from Bain Capital, which led Captora’s first funding round.

NEA partner Scott Sandell is joining the company’s board of directors. Sandell has previously led investments in several software companies, including Tableau, Workday, Salesforce, WebEx, and Data Domain.

The company was founded in 2012 by Paul Albright, Anindo Mukherjee, and Srihari Kumar and is based in Mountain View, Calif. It raised its first round of funding in March 2013, totaling between $2.5 million and $5.2 million, according to a public filing. The company already counts Marketo, Salesforce, ServiceMax, International Culinary Center, and AppDynamics among its customers.

Marketing platform startup AgilOne has closed a fresh $25 million round of funding, according to an SEC Form D filed today.

AgilOne’s marketing platform targets small- and medium-sized businesses that want to use big data to get insights to help grow their business. The platform promises to help clients understand which marketing activities make the most sense and which are just a waste of time and money.

This is AgilOne’s third round of funding. The company has now raised a total of $41 million to date.

Founded in 2006, the Mountain View, Calif.-based startup has over 100 employees. We’re reaching out to AgilOne for more information about the round and how it plans to spend the additional capital.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2014/04/15/agilone-raises-25m-to-help-small-companies-market-smarter-with-big-data/feed/01449743AgilOne raises $25M to help small companies market smarter with big dataPeople Pattern raises $4.5M to help you uncover the personality of your sales leadshttp://venturebeat.com/2013/12/31/people-patterns-raises-4-5m-to-reveal-much-more-about-your-sales-leads/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/12/31/people-patterns-raises-4-5m-to-reveal-much-more-about-your-sales-leads/#respondTue, 31 Dec 2013 14:05:51 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=877729People Pattern looks to social media accounts to learn about sales and marketing leads, and the approach has won new backing from investors.
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People Pattern, a company that evaluates social media to deliver insight about sales leads and other potential revenue drivers, has closed a $4.5 million round of new funding.

It’s the latest evidence that investors are betting on software for marketers. Gartner predicted that the chief marketing officer will spend more money on information technology than the chief information officer by 2017, and so investors are making moves to benefit when that time comes.

Mohr Davidow Ventures led the round for the Austin, Texas based company. The round also contained contributions from private investors. The deal comes on top of a $250,000 round of seed funding earlier this year, People Pattern cofounder and chief executive Ken Cho told VentureBeat in an interview.

“Really, what we’re trying to do is define the audience and the attributes around the audience that talk about the product, brand, or company, and not just around the conversation,” Cho said.

The company does that by applying data science to available social information associated with a particular sales lead. The new layer of information about the lead — that she likes classical music, for example — can be laced into the company’s existing databases, such as a customer-relationship managing tool for managing all the sales leads or even a spreadsheet full of email addresses for users in a customer-loyalty program.

With the new data, users can group their leads into categories and start sending them more targeted content.

People Pattern has been refining its data science algorithms to make the systems work right. The new funding, Cho said, will help the company bring on more staff fluent in techniques such as natural-language processing — the notion of pulling key information out of people’s real written words. People Pattern’s other cofounder, Jason Baldridge, is well versed in that process, as an associate professor of computational linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin. And Baldridge brought with him to the startup two data scientists who studied under him at the university, Cho said. But the team could use some help in developing the product further.

Marketing automation has hit a high point in the past year, too. Marketo went public in April, and Oracle bought Eloqua for $871 million last year. Oracle enriched its holdings by laying out $1.5 billion for Responsys. But software from Oracle, as well as Salesforce.com and Adobe, represent complementary technologies, not competition, Cho said. That’s because People Pattern goes beyond just summarizing what people are saying on Facebook and Twitter and categorizes people based on the things they say on social media.

People Pattern can also craft custom algorithms that can tell customers what they want to know about leads. For example, one algorithm can figure out where a potential customer currently sits in the sales lifecycle.

The startup now has eight customers, including the largest retailer in the world and the largest fast food company in the world, said Cho, who previously cofounded social media software company Spredfast. Even though the startup has already reeled in such big customers, Cho has chosen to make sure its own marketing materials — like head shots — stand out, so the company doesn’t get passed over as just another boring marketing software company. “Everything else is so generic,” he said. “I just thought, there had to be something fun in there,” he said.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2013/12/31/people-patterns-raises-4-5m-to-reveal-much-more-about-your-sales-leads/feed/0877729People Pattern raises $4.5M to help you uncover the personality of your sales leadsWhy Oracle dropped $1.5B for marketing software company Responsyshttp://venturebeat.com/2013/12/20/why-oracle-dropped-1-5b-for-marketing-software-company-responsys/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/12/20/why-oracle-dropped-1-5b-for-marketing-software-company-responsys/#respondFri, 20 Dec 2013 19:06:14 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=875283Oracle needs to stay competitive as cloud software competitor Salesforce.com adds marketing savvy. But the deal gets more than that out of its $1.5 billion Responsys acquisition.
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Legacy technology vendor Oracle can’t let Salesforce.com capture all of the market share for cloud-based digital marketing software. So Oracle is spending $1.5 billion for a 15-year-old company called Responsys.

With Responsys, marketers can design customized messaging for potential customers based on information available about them and then deliver that message through whichever media is most likely to get the desired response — email, ads on websites, text messages, social media ads, and so on.

The technology mainly markets to consumers, not businesses. Oracle already has technology for business-to-business marketing by way of its Eloqua buy.

“By bringing together Responsys and Oracle Eloqua in the Marketing Cloud, for the first time CMOs that support industries with B2C or B2B business models will be equipped to drive exceptional customer experiences across marketing interactions and throughout the customer lifecycle from a single platform,” Oracle said in the press release.

These days the company has loads of big customers, including Burton, Intuit, Lego, MetLife, National Geographic, Thomson Reuters, and Whole Foods.

Marketing automation has becoming a high-profile sector. Marketo went public in 2013. Oracle bought Eloqua for $871 million in 2012, and it’s only natural for Oracle to connect Eloqua and Responsys in its so-called marketing cloud, just as Salesforce is pushing its own with the help of ExactTarget’s technology. Meanwhile Adobe is also promoting its software with the marketing-cloud label stuck on it.

That meme was on the mind of Mike Schuh, a general partner at Foundation Capital and one of the first investors in Responsys, as he explained why he thought the acquisition makes sense in an interview this morning with VentureBeat.

ExactTarget was a company that often came up as Responsys was trying to close deals, Schuh said. Other companies are “either ankle biters or they’re not attempting to serve the market we serve,” he said. Once the deal closes, Oracle will have some level of feature parity.

“What Oracle wants to do is use Repsonsys and its executive team to be the binding element for their cloud marketing offering,” Schuh said, referring to leaders including Responsys chief executive Dan Springer. He joined the company in 2004. Back then, the business focused on email marketing. Recruiting Springer “made a world of difference,” Schuh said.

The company had cycled through four chief executives in three years before appointing Springer, according to Greg Gretsch, the managing director at Sigma West, who decided to back the company in 2001.

By the end of that year, the company “was off track,” Gretsch said, according to a transcript of his comments that a spokeswoman provided in an email to VentureBeat. “… For essentially three years, they didn’t sell to new customers. But the recurring revenue of SaaS (software-as-a-service) kept them afloat.” The company began working on a turnaround.

“When Dan came on, it took 18 months before they were able to get the business growing again,” Gretsch said. “… They started growing slowly at first, then more quickly, [then] went public [in] 2011.”

Gretsch takes that sort of achievement as more proof that “making money in VC is all about the people,” he said.

But for Schuh, proven leadership and the CMO-CIO bit aren’t the only justifications for the deal. He also thought there could be opportunities for Oracle to enrich its capabilities around customer relationship management, which has been the runaway product for Salesforce.

Finally, like many other companies, Oracle has high hopes as a cloud software vendor, as VentureBeat’s Eric Blattberg pointed out this week, while hardware might be a tough go as more companies look to lesser known vendors such as Quanta for cheaper data center equipment. So splurging on new software functionality could make more sense at this point than shelling out for new souped-up hardware.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2013/12/20/why-oracle-dropped-1-5b-for-marketing-software-company-responsys/feed/0875283Why Oracle dropped $1.5B for marketing software company ResponsysSuperheroes of marketing automation: The VentureBeat top 10http://venturebeat.com/2013/12/16/superheroes-of-marketing-automation-the-venturebeat-top-10/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/12/16/superheroes-of-marketing-automation-the-venturebeat-top-10/#respondMon, 16 Dec 2013 16:45:29 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=845033Once upon a time, you could launch a product or a service with a newspaper, radio, or TV ad; deliver orders to middlemen; or provide services yourself and watch the dollars roll in.
That fantasy world is long gone.
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Once upon a time, you could launch a product or a service with a newspaper, radio, or TV ad; deliver orders to middlemen; or provide services yourself and watch the dollars roll in.

That fantasy world is long gone, and in its place is a complex and quickly moving reality in which you need to source demand, manage leads, nurture prospects and make them customers, sell, deliver — and keep doing it over and over while maintaining and enhancing relationships.

In other words, yes, you actually have to talk to people, in a lot of different ways and via many different media.

That’s where marketing automation comes in. These technologies help you find customers, maintain relationships with them, nurture those relationships, and make the most of your marketing efforts.

Marketing automation is growing fast — 50 percent annually, according to some numbers — and is already a billion-dollar industry in the business-to-business market alone. Solutions range from $199/month to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and companies are adopting solutions from both massive long-time enterprise vendors such as IBM and startups that no one knew of five years ago — and barely anyone outside of the field of marketing automation knows today.

But the costs of picking the wrong marketing automation solution — or failing to plan — are massive.

￼”People who don’t have their processes planned out when they turn on their system take two to three months to recover,” says marketing automation expert David Raab.

The interesting part is that we’re in the middle of a revolution — a cloud-fueled revolution where marketing automation is transforming from something the leading and bleeding edge does to something that every midsized company needs to do,just in order to keep up. As as that change occurs, VentureBeat wants to be there, helping startup, small, and medium-sized businesses grow alongside them.

Oh, and we want your input. What follows is our initial report, but we’ll be updating it in the coming weeks as we hear from you.

Continue Reading ...]]>http://venturebeat.com/2013/12/16/superheroes-of-marketing-automation-the-venturebeat-top-10/feed/0845033Superheroes of marketing automation: The VentureBeat top 10Does marketing automation encourage bad behavior in marketers?http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/05/does-marketing-automation-encourage-bad-behavior-in-marketers/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/05/does-marketing-automation-encourage-bad-behavior-in-marketers/#respondSun, 05 May 2013 15:00:16 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=727252GUEST: Is new marketing technology enabling marketers to essentially spam people? It appears the current answer is yes, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
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This is a guest post by Katie Hollar, marketing manager at software research site Capterra.

Many companies are adopting marketing automation each day. But they aren’t necessarily changing their marketing habits as a result. So, is this new technology just enabling marketers to essentially spam people?

The current answer is yes, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

In recent years, the marketing automation software industry has exploded in popularity, and it’s become one of the fastest growing segments in the enterprise software space. For instance, the term “marketing automation” has had more Google searches in the beginning months of 2013 than it has at any other point over the past three years. And even on my company Capterra’s site, where millions of people come to search for business software each year, organic traffic for marketing automation software has grown by more than 20 percent year-over-year.

But according to a recent study by iContact, 56 percent of businesses say they plan to increase their use of email marketing in 2013, and on average, they only plan to grow their email lists by 28 percent this year.

So, more companies are buying marketing automation software, and as a result, they’re sending more emails more frequently. But their list of subscribers isn’t growing nearly as quickly as their email sending habits (actually, it’s shrinking at a faster rate due to people unsubscribing).

All this suggests that marketing automation is nothing but a glorified spamming engine. In fact, when I recently explained to my family what I typically do at work, several said, “Oh, so you SPAM people?”

“No,” I protested. “They’re opted-in! These people want to hear from us; they’ve found us through search and other inbound channels, and then filled out a form. Marketing automation just allows us to respond to them more efficiently.”

Despite my best efforts, they didn’t really understand how that was any different than spam. Which is precisely the problem.

To marketers like me, marketing automation has been a glorious solution to our problems. We (and by “we” I mean the general marketing community) knew all along that we shouldn’t be sending batch and blast emails to our entire email database, but without the time to segment lists, A/B test messaging, and send one-off emails the moment someone fills out a form, we were forced to just send out the blasts (and wrestle with the morality of that on our own time). With the advent and adoption of marketing automation software, all those pent-up ideas of how we should be sending emails were suddenly made possible. So we took advantage of the technology and started sending a lot of them.

But to consumers like my family members, the fact that we can now send emails with personalized messaging and specially-tailored offers the moment someone lands on our website doesn’t negate the fact that, at the end of the day, we’re sending them more emails.

Marketers need to catch up to the true capabilities of marketing automation technology, instead of using the technology to catch up on their marketing. We could be using marketing automation to send the same emails we sent before, but at a more relevant time, with more relevant content, and with more emphasis on the prospect. What we’re doing instead is sending the same old batch and blast emails from before, plus all the new, custom-tailored ones we wanted to send all along.

Fellow marketers, let’s agree to put an end to this before it gets too out of hand. Together, we can harness the powers of marketing automation software for good and not evil.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/05/does-marketing-automation-encourage-bad-behavior-in-marketers/feed/0727252Does marketing automation encourage bad behavior in marketers?Hot web optimization startup Optimizely gets $28M, boasts 400% revenue growthhttp://venturebeat.com/2013/04/10/hot-web-optimization-startup-optimizely-gets-28m-boasts-400-revenue-growth/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/10/hot-web-optimization-startup-optimizely-gets-28m-boasts-400-revenue-growth/#respondWed, 10 Apr 2013 13:00:13 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=713422Founder and CEO Dan Siroker formed the idea for the company while working as an analytics lead on the Obama campaign.
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Web optimization startup Optimizely has closed a $28 million funding round led by Benchmark Capital.

The San Francisco-based company was founded by Dan Siroker, an engineer who was inspired to launch the startup when working at Obama for America.

Siroker told me he first heard President Barack Obama speak in 2007 when he was working as a product manager at Google. Obama had made the pilgrimage to Silicon Valley to root out analytics tools that would prove beneficial for the campaign.

Siroker was so inspired that he quit Google, and went to work for the campaign as a volunteer. He would later rise up the ranks to become the director of analytics, and would lead a team of analysts using new technology to maximise voter registration and donations. “Even back in ’08, we viewed data as a means to make better decisions,” he explained by phone.

It was during his time working in D.C. that Siroker grew frustrated with the current suite of web optimization tools, such as Adobe’s Test & Target. So Siroker set out to create his own technology, Optimizely, which is billed as “A/B testing software you’ll actually use.”

The Obama and Romney campaigns used Optimizely in 2012, alongside 4,000 other customers. This quarter, it will launch the product in nine languages in 36 countries. The company says its revenue growth rate from March 2012 to March 2013 is 400 percent.

Optimizely’s team claims to be the third highest valued startup to graduate from the prestigious accelerator program Y Combinator — after Dropbox and AirBnB.

As part of the funding, Benchmark’s Peter Fenton will join the company’s board. Bain Capital Ventures, InterWest Partners, and Google Ventures participated in the round.

Inbound marketing software business HubSpot has raised $35 million in fresh funding to help it grow quickly, a sign that the six-year-old company could be readying to go public.

HubSpot offers marketing software suites that help businesses attract and convert new customers. The company claims to have 8,000 customers in 56 countries. It now has more than 400 employees, up 100 from a year ago, and it expects to hire 55 more folks before the end of this year.

“Our goal has always been to build a successful, enduring, independent company that transforms how the world does marketing. We’re generating revenue at an annualized run rate of $60 million, up more than 80% over last year, and we still see a huge market opportunity ahead of us,” HubSpot CEO and co-founder Brian Halligan said in a statement. “This financing sets us up for big investments in hiring and acquisitions so that we can continue to change the way the world does marketing.”

The new funding was raised from Altimeter Capital, Cross Creek Capital, and “a large, unnamed institutional investor,” and previous investors. HubSpot has raised a total of $101 million to date.

Cambridge, Mass.-based HubSpot was founded in 2006. Along with the funding, NetSuite CFO Ron Gill will join the company’s board of directors. In mid-October, serial entrepreneur and startup advisor Eric Ries joined HubSpot’s advisory board.

With this sixth-round of capital, the San Luis Obispo-based startup is plotting its international expansion — it already has satellite offices in New York and the UK, with a third opening soon in Australia.

MindBody provides a suite of marketing tools, scheduling, analytics, networking and point of sale services for health, beauty and wellness providers. It has been around since 2001, and has witnessed the explosion of competition, primarily online scheduling systems like Schedulicity, SalonBooker, Appointment Plus, and Groupon Scheduler.

To strike ahead of the competition, the company has diversified its software stack. Now, it faces heat from Salesforce, SugarCRM and other major customer relationship management (CRM) systems, which also target small businesses.

MindBody claims it is the only company that can offer the full gamut of software and specifically caters to the health and wellness space– for this reason, it is experiencing impressive growth with 900 businesses signing up per month.

“Our intent is to enable and link the 2 million beauty and wellness businesses operating worldwide with the hundreds of millions of consumers who can use their services to improve their own lives,” Rick Stollmeyer, the company’s CEO (pictured above), told VentureBeat.

Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP) participated in all the previous rounds; with this funding, the company has a total of $58 million in the bank.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2012/11/01/mindbody-funding/feed/0567265MindBody, a Salesforce for health and beauty, nabs $35M